Facts and Morals: What’s in an Argument?

Photo by Mohamed Hassan is licensed under the Pixabay License.

Over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency, many Americans became concerned about the fate of truth and reality in our country. But the problem isn’t really about facts—it’s about morals. To understand this, it’s important to recognize the two registers of truth, or “universes,” and how language is used to apprehend them. The empirical universe is the obvious one, existing in descriptive statements like “my bed is soft,” or patterns, like “most Americans support a higher minimum wage.” On the other hand, the moral universe generates reactions to these statements and consists of normative, unobservable claims like “soft beds are good” or the less trivial ideas that “all humans are created equal” or “the minimum wage should be raised.” Argumentation and discourse revolve around our ability to navigate between these two universes and provide an argument for why the other side’s moral facts are inconsistent or ours are superior. This is why the conflation of empirical and moral realities is so damaging: assuming the source of disagreement is in the facts and not the morals rarely leads to a fruitful discussion.

To understand how we might connect the empirical universe and the moral universe in an argument, we can trace the path of the mind as it tries to develop such an argument. Generally, when presented with a set of data, we first try to empirically extract patterns and then identify a mechanism for that pattern with our moral sensibilities, as it is almost impossible to ethically isolate a mechanism for social or political events. For instance, we might take America’s exceedingly high two-year follow-up recidivism rate, which is the third-highest in the world at 60 percent. Why have we done so poorly? Irving Kristol, the “godfather of neoconservatism,” proposes one mechanism in his essay “Human Nature and Social Reform:” altering someone’s social environment cannot force someone to become a better person. Instead, they must be motivated to change themselves, which would imply that other countries have lower recidivism rates due to better inherent motivations. On the other hand, journalist and writer Malcolm Gladwell identifies another possible mechanism in his book, The Tipping Point, when he says that attempts to reform environments should look to the “little things” that generate a physical environment’s atmosphere. This idea would lead us to conclude high American recidivism rates are caused by the atmosphere of vandalism in American cities. In yet another interpretation of the pattern, communist activist Angela Davis argues that moral reform cannot occur in a punitive institution like a prison, but requires a restorative, educational institution, leading us to find that the mechanism for this trend is less “punitive” prisons as found in other nations. 

How could we possibly test which of these mechanisms is correct? If we were to examine other countries, it would almost be impossible to quantify “motivation,” “atmosphere,” or “punitiveness” in a methodologically indisputable way, let alone disentangle their impact on recidivism. Approaching the mechanism from the assumption (human nature) would be still more difficult to ethically test. Even the Pew Center, one of the leading think tanks in empirical social science research, released a report on prison policy with a disclaimer that policymakers could not merely rely on data and would have to look to the particular contexts of their constituencies. If Kristol, Gladwell, and Davis were to sit down and debate how to improve rehabilitation in prisons, they would never get to a practical solution if they merely began presenting and disputing each other’s evidence about human nature or “motivation;” in argument, each speaker must present a moral vision (e.g., humans cannot be altered by their environment unless they are willing to be) and analyze the evidence for support. 

This seems obvious, but my Instagram feed is littered with “Only Republican Senators voted against this bill. It’s a fact,” with no real argument—obviously my friends are trying to signal to me that Republicans are morally perverse, but this fact would merely cement my previously-held beliefs, whether I was for the bill and against Republicans or against the bill and for Republicans. These posts are completely ineffective as arguments, because our understanding of the objective world is inherently colored by the moral. This isn’t a new concept; in Chapter 1 of his 1922 book, Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann describes the “pseudo-environment” as the image we have of the world around us that reflects imperfect information, but we take as reality nonetheless. Lippmann observed one instance of the pseudo-environment’s power when he encountered German soldiers who didn’t really even know what World War I was about and had been motivated by propaganda to join. In a contemporary context, if someone reads an article from The Daily Wire, what determines whether or not they trust that article? If the details are incompatible with their pseudo-environment or if Ben Shapiro is untrustworthy in that pseudo-environment, they are unlikely to believe the article. When we wave studies and data in front of QAnon supporters, the reason they don’t believe us is not because they are recalcitrant to the truth, but because the facts and the sources are incompatible with their pseudo-environments. If we want to convince them, or anyone, of anything, we must take into consideration how their moral universe is coloring their understanding of the objective and argue with those moral statements. If we continue to ignore the normative arguments, it is easy, just as a math student slowly forgets the proof as they repeatedly use the formula, to hone in on disputes of objective reality and forget that the source of disagreement is mostly in the moral universe. If we forget the moral justifications and the proofs, they eventually become assumptions and we find ourselves operating on blind faith.

Yet, the appearance of an “epistemic crisis” is not entirely unfounded. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville develops “tyranny of the majority,” a concept that tells us Americans dogmatically trust some perceived “majority,” as a product of our understanding of each other as equals—if everyone is equally capable of thought, shouldn’t the majority have the highest probability of being right? However, he never defines what constitutes a majority; perhaps a majority of my family is a compelling enough majority, or perhaps it is a majority of my neighborhood, city, county, state, or nation. I believe the majority shifts depending on where we gather our information. Early American politics was violent and messy because people were convinced by the local majorities they saw in newspapers. But in the 20th century, with the rise of mass media and the three major broadcasting channels, the perceived majority became the nation. As technology improved, our information sources once again decentralized, leaving us with Twitter and Facebook. According to Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, social media websites have designed algorithms to give us not only content based on our preferences, but also content with high engagement, whether it be in the form of likes or angry comments. This presents us with feeds and timelines filled with either opinions that align with ours or vehemently diverge. Resultantly, we believe that there is a crisis and become convinced that the other side is out of touch with the truth or brainwashed. Former President Donald Trump took advantage of the Twitter algorithms by churning out sensational tweets and eventually amassed his own “majority” that would support him beyond the confines of social media. His ban from Twitter contributes to this understanding: even the platform recognized that Trump was able to control and negatively influence his followers.

As we continue to navigate this new realm of information, it might be appropriate to look back to one of the oldest philosophers in the Western canon for advice: Socrates. In Plato’s Crito, even at his deathbed, Socrates is willing to reexamine his deeply held beliefs about which actions are just and which are unjust. He believes in the examined life, or the constant reexamination of one’s beliefs and living by the best rational argument, because it is impossible to be certain that any normative statement is correct. By constantly running ourselves through the proofs, perhaps we will evolve from the student of mathematics, who remembers only the formulas, into the mathematician, who understands how to turn the most basic premises into a solution in the real world.